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QUOTES ABOUT RELIGION

Quotes about religion reflect humanity’s enduring search for meaning, purpose, and the sacred. They express faith, doubt, devotion, and reflection across cultures and traditions. The following collection offers perspectives that invite contemplation on belief and the role it plays in human life.    Back

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Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.
- David Eagleman
Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
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All religions are good 'in principle' - but unfortunately this abstract Good has only rarely prevented their practitioners from behaving like bastards.
- Paul Karl Feyerabend
Farewell to Reason
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For myself I think that one wrong does not right the other, and forgiveness cannot be won with useless tears or alms to the Church.
- José Rizal
Noli Me Tángere
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As he drank more and more, he became inebriated, and began to fashion damaged human beings.
- Teju Cole
Open City
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For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain. If people need religion, ignore them and maybe they will ignore you, and you can go on with your life. It wasn't until I was beginning to do Star Trek that the subject of religion arose. What brought it up was that people were saying that I would have a chaplain on board the Enterprise. I replied, "No, we don't.
- Gene Roddenberry
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I'm as religious as the next man - which is to say I'll keep in with the local parson for form's sake and read the lessons on feast-days because my tenants expect it, but I've never been fool enough to confuse religion with belief in God. That's where so many clergymen... go wrong
- George MacDonald Fraser
Flashman in the Great Game
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I fear one day I'll meet God, he'll sneeze and I won't know what to say
- Ronnie Shakes
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But people didn't have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Cat’s Cradle
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But you've always used words so wordily in crafty defense of your Trinity, although He never needed such defense before you got Him from me as a Unity.
- Walter M. Miller Jr.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
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I know that you are wise. When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence…You believe that the story is true, because you responded to it from that sense of truth deep within you. But that sense of truth does not respond to a story's factuality...[rather] to a story's causality - whether it faithfully shows the way the universe functions.
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As long as we were living in the spirit we would continue to be blessed
- Crystal Flanagan
10 Seconds from Glory
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A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.
- Michael Crichton
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When I hear that "Possession is the grave of love," I remember that a religion may begin with the resurrection.
- F.H. Bradley
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In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination – making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish.” (161)
- Thomas Cahill
How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe 
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It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals.
- Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau: A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod
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Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.
- Albert Einstein
The World As I See It
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For official record, if become bankrupt old retail distribution centers-labeled supermega, so-enlarged foodstuff market- later reincarnate to become worship shrine. First sell food-stuff, next then same structure sell battered furnitures, next now born as gymnasium club, next broker flea markets, only at final end of life...sell religions.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If my mother's intention in whole or in part was to ensure that I never had to suffer any indignity or embarrassment for being a Jew, then she succeeded well enough. And in any case there were enough intermarriages and 'conversions' on both sides of her line to make me one of those many mischling hybrids who are to be found distributed all over the known world. And, as someone who doesn't really believe that the human species is subdivided by 'race,' let alone that a nation or nationality can be defined by its religion, why should I not let the whole question slide away from me? Why—and then I'll stop asking rhetorical questions—did I at some point resolve that, in whatever tone of voice I was asked 'Are you a Jew?' I would never hear myself deny it?
- Christopher Hitchens
Hitch 22: A Memoir
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We are aware that the order of God requires the exercise of humility, but not of servility of slaves; but a humility that can be associated with undoubted courage and unflinching integrity; at the same time there is no room for pride, self-sufficient pride, that rests solely upon its own capabilities, and refuses to look for the support and countenance of others.--MS 7:91 [MS is the Millenial Star]
- John A. Widtsoe
Priesthood and Church Government
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion... religion is institutionalized spirituality. — Mother Jones November/December 1997.
- Huston Smith
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the respectable ones go
- Stephen King
The Gunslinger
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Religion has a way of making people into idiots is what my father says.
- Victor Lodato
Mathilda Savitch
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I hallowed out my Bible to put another, smaller Bible inside.
- Christy Leigh Stewart
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In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is.
- Gustave Flaubert
Bouvard and Pécuchet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.
- David Eagleman
Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
All religions are good 'in principle' - but unfortunately this abstract Good has only rarely prevented their practitioners from behaving like bastards.
- Paul Karl Feyerabend
Farewell to Reason
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For myself I think that one wrong does not right the other, and forgiveness cannot be won with useless tears or alms to the Church.
- José Rizal
Noli Me Tángere
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
As he drank more and more, he became inebriated, and began to fashion damaged human beings.
- Teju Cole
Open City
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain. If people need religion, ignore them and maybe they will ignore you, and you can go on with your life. It wasn't until I was beginning to do Star Trek that the subject of religion arose. What brought it up was that people were saying that I would have a chaplain on board the Enterprise. I replied, "No, we don't.
- Gene Roddenberry
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'm as religious as the next man - which is to say I'll keep in with the local parson for form's sake and read the lessons on feast-days because my tenants expect it, but I've never been fool enough to confuse religion with belief in God. That's where so many clergymen... go wrong
- George MacDonald Fraser
Flashman in the Great Game
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I fear one day I'll meet God, he'll sneeze and I won't know what to say
- Ronnie Shakes
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But people didn't have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Cat’s Cradle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But you've always used words so wordily in crafty defense of your Trinity, although He never needed such defense before you got Him from me as a Unity.
- Walter M. Miller Jr.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I know that you are wise. When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence…You believe that the story is true, because you responded to it from that sense of truth deep within you. But that sense of truth does not respond to a story's factuality...[rather] to a story's causality - whether it faithfully shows the way the universe functions.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
As long as we were living in the spirit we would continue to be blessed
- Crystal Flanagan
10 Seconds from Glory
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.
- Michael Crichton
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When I hear that "Possession is the grave of love," I remember that a religion may begin with the resurrection.
- F.H. Bradley
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination – making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish.” (161)
- Thomas Cahill
How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe 
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals.
- Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau: A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.
- Albert Einstein
The World As I See It
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For official record, if become bankrupt old retail distribution centers-labeled supermega, so-enlarged foodstuff market- later reincarnate to become worship shrine. First sell food-stuff, next then same structure sell battered furnitures, next now born as gymnasium club, next broker flea markets, only at final end of life...sell religions.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If my mother's intention in whole or in part was to ensure that I never had to suffer any indignity or embarrassment for being a Jew, then she succeeded well enough. And in any case there were enough intermarriages and 'conversions' on both sides of her line to make me one of those many mischling hybrids who are to be found distributed all over the known world. And, as someone who doesn't really believe that the human species is subdivided by 'race,' let alone that a nation or nationality can be defined by its religion, why should I not let the whole question slide away from me? Why—and then I'll stop asking rhetorical questions—did I at some point resolve that, in whatever tone of voice I was asked 'Are you a Jew?' I would never hear myself deny it?
- Christopher Hitchens
Hitch 22: A Memoir
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We are aware that the order of God requires the exercise of humility, but not of servility of slaves; but a humility that can be associated with undoubted courage and unflinching integrity; at the same time there is no room for pride, self-sufficient pride, that rests solely upon its own capabilities, and refuses to look for the support and countenance of others.--MS 7:91 [MS is the Millenial Star]
- John A. Widtsoe
Priesthood and Church Government
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion... religion is institutionalized spirituality. — Mother Jones November/December 1997.
- Huston Smith
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the respectable ones go
- Stephen King
The Gunslinger
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Religion has a way of making people into idiots is what my father says.
- Victor Lodato
Mathilda Savitch
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I hallowed out my Bible to put another, smaller Bible inside.
- Christy Leigh Stewart
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is.
- Gustave Flaubert
Bouvard and Pécuchet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text.
- David Eagleman
Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
All religions are good 'in principle' - but unfortunately this abstract Good has only rarely prevented their practitioners from behaving like bastards.
- Paul Karl Feyerabend
Farewell to Reason
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For myself I think that one wrong does not right the other, and forgiveness cannot be won with useless tears or alms to the Church.
- José Rizal
Noli Me Tángere
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
As he drank more and more, he became inebriated, and began to fashion damaged human beings.
- Teju Cole
Open City
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain. If people need religion, ignore them and maybe they will ignore you, and you can go on with your life. It wasn't until I was beginning to do Star Trek that the subject of religion arose. What brought it up was that people were saying that I would have a chaplain on board the Enterprise. I replied, "No, we don't.
- Gene Roddenberry
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I'm as religious as the next man - which is to say I'll keep in with the local parson for form's sake and read the lessons on feast-days because my tenants expect it, but I've never been fool enough to confuse religion with belief in God. That's where so many clergymen... go wrong
- George MacDonald Fraser
Flashman in the Great Game
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I fear one day I'll meet God, he'll sneeze and I won't know what to say
- Ronnie Shakes
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But people didn't have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Cat’s Cradle
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But you've always used words so wordily in crafty defense of your Trinity, although He never needed such defense before you got Him from me as a Unity.
- Walter M. Miller Jr.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I know that you are wise. When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence…You believe that the story is true, because you responded to it from that sense of truth deep within you. But that sense of truth does not respond to a story's factuality...[rather] to a story's causality - whether it faithfully shows the way the universe functions.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
As long as we were living in the spirit we would continue to be blessed
- Crystal Flanagan
10 Seconds from Glory
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.
- Michael Crichton
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When I hear that "Possession is the grave of love," I remember that a religion may begin with the resurrection.
- F.H. Bradley
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination – making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish.” (161)
- Thomas Cahill
How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe 
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals.
- Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau: A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.
- Albert Einstein
The World As I See It
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For official record, if become bankrupt old retail distribution centers-labeled supermega, so-enlarged foodstuff market- later reincarnate to become worship shrine. First sell food-stuff, next then same structure sell battered furnitures, next now born as gymnasium club, next broker flea markets, only at final end of life...sell religions.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
If my mother's intention in whole or in part was to ensure that I never had to suffer any indignity or embarrassment for being a Jew, then she succeeded well enough. And in any case there were enough intermarriages and 'conversions' on both sides of her line to make me one of those many mischling hybrids who are to be found distributed all over the known world. And, as someone who doesn't really believe that the human species is subdivided by 'race,' let alone that a nation or nationality can be defined by its religion, why should I not let the whole question slide away from me? Why—and then I'll stop asking rhetorical questions—did I at some point resolve that, in whatever tone of voice I was asked 'Are you a Jew?' I would never hear myself deny it?
- Christopher Hitchens
Hitch 22: A Memoir
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We are aware that the order of God requires the exercise of humility, but not of servility of slaves; but a humility that can be associated with undoubted courage and unflinching integrity; at the same time there is no room for pride, self-sufficient pride, that rests solely upon its own capabilities, and refuses to look for the support and countenance of others.--MS 7:91 [MS is the Millenial Star]
- John A. Widtsoe
Priesthood and Church Government
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the American Medical Association? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion... religion is institutionalized spirituality. — Mother Jones November/December 1997.
- Huston Smith
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the respectable ones go
- Stephen King
The Gunslinger
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Religion has a way of making people into idiots is what my father says.
- Victor Lodato
Mathilda Savitch
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I hallowed out my Bible to put another, smaller Bible inside.
- Christy Leigh Stewart
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is.
- Gustave Flaubert
Bouvard and Pécuchet
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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19
20
21
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